It was a lovely sunny day in Dublin the other day, and it was surprisingly warm after a long cold spell. I grabbed my cameras and headed out to do some street and cityscape photography in the city. As well as trying to get some new street photography, I also wanted to shoot another episode of “Street Photo Diary”

My main computer is an ageing 2012 Mac Pro. At the time it was reasonably well specced, but lately, I have been really struggling with it, especially with newer versions of Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications. In particular, it has become increasingly difficult to run multiple applications at once, and with the most recent round of updates, I cool no longer run Lightroom and Photoshop simultaneously.

I was playing around with some photos in Photoshop earlier today, and I was also using Luminar as a plug-in, when I stumbled across something cool, almost by accident. It’s one of those things, that seems kind of obvious on hindsight, but I had never thought of trying this before. You can use Luminar non-destructively within Photoshop if you use it on a smart layer.

The much rumoured new top end Fujifilm X-Trans APS-C camera has been announced this morning. The X-H1 comes in a new body design that is similar to the medium format GF-X and the big headline feature is the addition of in-body stabilisation

Yesterday Adobe released the much-hyped “speed most” update to Lightroom. The new version, which had been previously released to a number of websites in beta also has a few new features in addition to the performance improvements. So is it any good?

I’m happy to announce that my latest in a series of guides for Fuji X-Series cameras is now available. The official title is “Fuji Jpegs: A Guide to Shooting and Processing” is a 76 page guide with tips and techniques for getting the best results when shooting with Fuji’s Jpeg engine.

Sometimes I think a tripod is like a good pair of shoes. While anyone that fits will do for walking around, you really need to find the right one for you in order to be comfortable with it. I have three different tripods, all of which work perfectly fine, but none are exactly comfortable. With that in mind, I’ve been looking for something that fits my needs a little better, so when the folks at K&F sent me a tripod to review I thought that this was a combination of good timing and good fortune, as I wanted to try out this exact type.

I’ve covered working with Fuji RAW files in Luminar before here on the blog, but I haven’t talked too much about using it with RAW files from other cameras. I had been going through some old images for another project, and I came across some images that I had taken with the Sony A7II which I had borrowed from a friend at the time. So, I tried some of the images in Luminar, and I was pleasantly surprised.

I’ve been working on my next Fuji guide for so long now, I can’t really remember when it started. I had wanted to write a guide on the specifics of working with Fuji jpegs, and I had a plan all laid out, but it ended up being more difficult that I had anticipated. I kept deciding to add parts, and then I would rewrite sections, and eventually the plan kind of went out the window. However, it’s finally nearly ready, and so I hope to be able to launch it next week. So what’s it about then?

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I go through periods of wanting to put the effort into it and then wondering if its worth the effort. On the one hand, it’s the platform of choice at the moment for photographers, whether you like that or not. On the other hand, ever since Facebook took over and started integrating its algorithm, I now only see a fraction of the posts from the people I follow, which is infuriating. However, I’ve decided to give it one more push before I give up. With that in mind, I was researching various techniques and tips for growing the platform, and I’ve come across some interesting ideas.

They say the best way to learn is by making mistakes. Well, if that’s true, then I learned a lot making this video. I was in two minds whether to even share it or not, but in the end I was convinced to put it up, regardless. The video itself isn’t too bad, but I made some mistakes when shooting that I’m kind of embarrassed about. So here’s what happened…

A couple of sites have been reporting over the last few days about the upcoming 7.2 release of Lightroom. Adobe have decided to focus on performance for this next release, and as a testament as to how important they feel this is, they’ve sent beta copies to various photography websites and news organisations ahead of time to show how serious they are about it.

Skylum software has just announced the first Luminar 2018 update for..well, 2018! The update focuses mainly on bug fixes and adds support for more languages on the Windows version. There are no new features apart from some additional camera support, so sorry, no sign of the DAM side of thing yet :-(

One of the highly anticipated new features in the latest Firmware update for the X-Pro 2 was the addition of highlight clipping warning in Live view. While you could get the “blinkies” previously in playback, there was no option to see them in live view until now. After you install firmware 4.0, you still need to enable it in the menu in order to turn it on.

I recently wrote about and made a video demonstrating Lightroom’s new AI-based automatic settings. If you haven’t seen it already, Lightroom now uses artificial intelligence when applying its automatic settings, and it’s much improved over the previous incarnation. However, after I had talked about that a reader sent me an interesting question: “How do you sync this auto option across multiple images?”. At first, I thought you would just use the synchronisation button at the bottom of the develop module, but it turns out, it’s not that straightforward. There are a few ways to do it, but they require a little work to find.

When Lightroom first came out, one of the biggest complaints that people had, was that the colours would change when importing RAW files. This led to the inclusion of colour profiles, designed to mimic a camera’s various picture modes, and this seems to address the problem. However, as time has gone by and Lightroom has supported more and more cameras, the quality and accuracy of the included colour profiles have started to vary significantly. If you find that, even with selecting a colour profile that matches what you shot in camera, the colours are still quite a bit off, then this trick may help you resolve the problem.

It’s been something of an odd January here in Ireland. For a start, it’s been pretty bloody dark. It has’t exactly been the ideal environment to go out an take photos. Being sick didn’t help either. I had just been thinking to myself I hadn’t really shot any street photography recently, and then, as if by magic, the opportunity presented itself, so off I went.

While it has been out for a little while now, I haven’t had a chance to try Fuji’s new X-Raw Studio application until quite recently. Part of this was because when it was initially released it didn’t support the X-Pro 2 (or rather the X-Pro 2 didn’t support it) and it was also partly because I have been pretty busy (and sick) and I just didn’t get around to it. Now that I have finally had a chance to test it out, here are my first impressions…